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Read and Write Very Short Stories

Reading and writing both help to improve your vocabulary and give you the opportunity to use your language skills in a creative way.

Today's activity will show you how to get simple quick writing practice and how to give and receive feedback and criticism of your written work. The activity is based around a site called Five Card Stories and will help you to create a story based on 5 images.

Task:

First you are going to read some very short stories based on images. Look at the five images that go with it, read each story and then vote how good you think the story is. If you think the story is really good, give it 10 stars. If you think it's really bad, give it just one.

Now you have read and voted on the stories try to improve them. Below each story, you have the chance to write your own version using the same images. You can either rewrite the story and try to improve it or write your own story based on the same images.

To write the story just give it a title, use add a name (it doesn't have to be your real name) complete the story and then type in the two security words and save it to the site. You''ll then be able to come back each day and see how people have voted on your story.

If you enjoy short writing activities you can come back to the site and create your own story by choosing images yourself. Just go to: http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/flickr.php and select the images you want in your story. Tip: It's easiest if the first image you select is of a person or animal, this can then be the main character in your story.

I hope you enjoy this short reading and writing activity and create some wonderful stories. Please leave a link to any you create in the comments section below.

My students don't usually enjoy writing stories but this activity was really motivating. It also fits any syllabus (e.g. I told them to write one sentence using 2nd conditional). We published the stories on our blog http://welcome.21classes.com